A need, which is very felt in the field of furniture production and in particular in the field of production of furniture for offices, is that of providing modular pieces, which are composed of elements easy to connect to each other and providing as high versatility as possible in disposing the various pieces.
Furnishing a room used as an office may, in fact, require various components such as work desks, shelves, movable walls, in accordance with complicated and articulated configurations.
Moreover, among the different criteria for designing such pieces of furniture, the ergonomic characteristics and the optimisation of the functional characteristics becomes more and more important. This fact often implies designing series of pieces of furniture including components with irregular, non linear shape.
Consequently, the support frames of the components must include horizontal elements, or bars, which are not connected to one another according to squared angles, but rather according to diverse angles, in the horizontal plane, and anyway parallel to the extension of the shelves or work desks.
The bars are connected to one another and to vertical posts by means of connection members, which can be separated from, or made integral with, the above mentioned bars or posts.
All this, among other things, implies the necessity to provide a connection system capable of connecting one or more bars of the frame to the respective post, in accordance with all the possible angles as required by the designed configuration.
On the other hand, it would be anyway extremely important that this connection system included a very limited number of parts, so as to keep production, storage management and montage operation simple and inexpensive.
The conventional connection systems usually include connection points between the bars and the respective post with one or more fixed orientations and are produced according to different constructive techniques.
An example of such connection systems is described in the Italian patent application No. BO2001A 00528. According to the system described therein, the shape of the post is substantially squared. Each corner has a recess extending along the entire post. In each side of the post there is made a side dovetail groove, also extending along the entire post.
A bar can be secured to each one of the corners, as well as to each one of the side grooves, by means of suitable fastening blocks provided at the ends of the bar. The fastening blocks for securing the bar to the corners are different from the ones for fastening the bars to the side grooves.
Although the above mentioned connection system is quite easy to use and allows different heights for each one of the bars being secured to the post, the bars can be secured to the post only according to a pre-determined limited number of angles.